By Mike Smith, Meteorological Musings
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said 7,000 megawatts of generating capacity tripped [“tripped” means failed]Tuesday night, leaving the state without enough juice. That’s enough capacity to power about 1.4 million homes. By rotating outages, ERCOT said it prevented total blackouts.
“We have the double whammy of extremely high demand, given the lowest temperatures in 15 years, combined with generation that’s been compromised and is producing less than expected or needed,” said Oncor spokeswoman Catherine Cuellar. Oncor operates power lines in North Texas and facilitated the blackouts for ERCOT.
— above from the “Dallas Morning News”
The article didn’t give a clue as to what generating capability failed, but I can make a pretty good guess: Wind energy.
When the wind is light, the turbine blades do not turn. And, the coldest nights usually occur with snow cover and light winds. The 9pm weather map for the region is below. The red number at upper right is the current temperature and they are well below zero deep into New Mexico and parts of Kansas and Colorado, so regional power use is high. Springfield, CO was already -15°F. Temperatures are in the single digits and teens over most Texas with very light winds in the areas where the turbines are located.
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| Map courtesy National Center for Atmospheric Research |
For a time, Texas was bragging about being the #1 state for “wind power” (it still is) and we were bombarded with TV commercials and newspaper editorial touting the “Pickens Plan” for massive spending on wind energy. Pickens himself was building a huge wind farm in northwest Texas. He has now ceased construction.
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| Wind power capacity in 2008. Texas has more than twice as
much as any other state. |
Now, because of relying so much on wind power, the state is suffering blackouts. My book’s publisher, Greenleaf Book Group in Austin, was without power all day and Austin wasn’t even affected by the recent winter storm. Mexico is trying to help by shipping power to Texas, but it is not enough.
Of course, Great Britain has experienced wind power failures (and rolling blackouts) during cold weather due to light winds. So has Minnesota, just last winter. I think we should learn from them.
If Texas had made the same dollar investment in new coal and/or nuclear power plants they would probably be snug and warm tonight. Do we we really want to sacrifice our families’ safety and security along with business productivity during extreme cold for the sake of political correctness?
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Also FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.
See Mike Smith’s book on “how science tamed the weather”.
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UPDATE: 2/3
THE PLOT THICKENS. Please read the addition to this story (at the bottom): http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/equal-time-american-wind-energy.html
Again, this had NOTHING to do with wind power. A coal fired plant failed. Nat gas plants failed because of a shortage of nat gas in the ATMOS system. ATMOS has enough capacity to supply those plants in the summer for topping off purposes. It is WINTER, ergo an insufficient supply for the nat gas plants and nat gas consumption of everyone else.
Was this a perfect storm, maybe. Could ERCOT and ONCOR have done a better job of priortizing the feeders subject to power cuts? Bet the Lt. Gov. (the Gov. in Texas has almost no political power – vestige of actions of Gov. Ma Ferguson in the depression) jumps on somebody about this.
Kristoffer Haldrup says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:36 pm
I suggest you find out where all your electricity comes from when the wind isn’t blowing (ie clear cold winter days – we get a lot of those in your neck of the woods)
Hint – it comes from a country next door who do NUCLEAR power. Please ask your local representative and wind farm managers exactly how many new windmills are planned – and why
The laugh is wind powered countries being totally reliant on those nasty nukes next door. (Bit like Holland which won;t do nukes – but buys a lot of electricity form France – 80% nuke…)
Wind Power can not do base load.
Wind power can not be relied on to supply peak load top up – because the wind doesn’t always blow (or blows to strongly).
Wind power looks pretty (or not) and is pretty useless at providing a DEPENDABLE SOURCE OF ELECTRICITY. I presume you do like the light to come on when you turn it on ?
It has been in the last 7 or 8 years that Texas embarked on building around 12 GW (12 plants, more or less) of new coal baseload generation that was critically needed. How much of that got built?
@Ken S
And Ken, after you’ve purchased that generator, you’ll be set for when the wind power nonsense pushes utility power as high as Obama plans for it to “necessarily” be pushed. Then you’ll be better off running your generator with $6 a gallon gas than buying wind energy from the grid.
OK, I was confused about the timeline, and Mike Smith’s use of “yesterday” and “last night”, on his blog didn’t help. I think I have it sorted out now:
The actual blackouts happened the night of Feb. 1-2; late on Feb. 2 Mike speculated that wind power was essentially absent at the time, but had no data. He pointed to wind data for late Wednesday Feb. 2 and suggested wind was making a minor contribution at the time of posting, i.e. late Feb. 2. AWEA says Texas windmills were actually generating a significant fraction of their capacity during the blackouts early on Feb. 2.; Mike on his blog points out that AWEA has no data for late on Feb. 2, the time of his wind data. BTW, apparently the blackouts ended early Feb. 2.
Since part of Mike Smith’s article was explicitly speculative, and AWEA’s data (so far unrebutted) refute that speculation, I think he or Anthony should update the article for latecomers. I for one will think no less of Mike for admitting the mistake; premature expostulation happens to all of us, and credibility is worth more than imagined infallibility (as most politicians have yet to learn). 🙂
If AWEA provides data to either confirm or refute Mike’s speculation about Texas wind power late on Feb. 2, that should be added to the article, too.
BTW, I agree with Mike that wind power should receive no subsidies or mandated quotas, hidden or explicit, and in most locations would be uneconomical without them.
Deja vu? Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency HOUSTON | Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:11pm EST
MORE – see link above
15,000 people are out of gas in Tucson and evidently it is an interstate pipeline problem stretching all the way from West texas to Arizona. There are not enough supplies in the pipeline to meet demand. There is not a space heater available in town and it is expected to reach 15 degrees tonight and be the coldest temp in Febuary history. water pipes have broken all over town. We are not used to this. My citrus are toast.
I’m thinking it was around the 2 AM CST mark on the 2nd … when the really cold temps ‘took hold’ …
Closer to midday based on media reports and obs in the field …
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BillyBob says:
February 3, 2011 at 2:57 pm
“A few questions for Michael Goggin,”
The following should answer some of your questions. The problem started with recently built coal plants. The new emission controls’ performance in record cold weather is suspect. Several new coal plants going offline cut power to natural gas pumping stations which then caused pressure to drop at natural gas power plants combined with increased demand for residential gas heating in the record cold.
Notably, wind generation had some minor icing problems but continued to deliver 3.5 to 4 gigawatts of maximum capacity of 9.4 gigawatts. 40% of maximum capacity for wind power is remarkably good at any time. They held up just fine and continued to deliver nearly as much power as the state’s nuclear power plants which have combined capacity of 5 gigawatts.
Any questions? I’m happy to do the proper research since the author of the OP, Mike Smith, seems either unwilling or unable to perform any due diligence in his haste to blame wind farms.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-energy/electric-reliability-council-texas/the-rolling-chain-of-events-behind-texas-blackouts/
Sorry Anthony. I think I was right the first time and whole OP is by Mike Smith. It can get confusing when your name is still at the top and it doesn’t say “guest post by Mike Smith”
In any case someone should make a retraction. According to ERCOT Texas’ wind farms continued to deliver 3.5 to 4 gigawatts of 9.4 gigawatts faceplate capacity. I’ve been reading claims, here and elsewhere, that wind farms only deliver 8% to 30% of faceplate due to wind speed variability. For Texas wind farms to have delivered around 40% of faceplate capacity during this power crisis is nothing short of outstanding performance.
For someone who asked about cost of wind vs. nuclear:
According to US DoE wind generation is $149/kwh and advanced nuclear is $119 but Texas’ nuke plants are conventional not advanced so it’s probably a bit closer to parity than that. In any case the nuke plants are baseline generators while wind power is called in when baseline demand is exceeded. In the case today they performed exceedingly well while several recently built coal plants going offline due to cold weather problems is the root cause.
I’d like to add this tidbit from an EIA.DOE.GOV report excerpted as follows:
See also the Natural Gas Transportation Update part on that page for notes regarding nat. gas issues, e.g.:
A “linepack” is the gas effectively stored ‘in transit’ when a long 42″ pipeline is pumped full of gas at 1000 PSI or more …
Linepack: A 50-mile section of 42-inch transmission line operating at about 1,000 pounds of pressure contains about 200 million cubic feet of gas — enough to power a kitchen range for more than 2,000 years. The amount of gas in the pipe is called the “linepack.”
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What ratepayers in Texas should really be cheesed off about is all that mis-allocated capitol in idle wind turbines. That capitol could have been used to build additional peaking plants to prevent the rolling blackouts.
Hi Everyone,
THE PLOT THICKENS. Please read the addition to this story (at the bottom): http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/equal-time-american-wind-energy.html
Mike
“Also FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/28/us-utilities-ercot-wind-idUSN2749522920080228
The incident in 2008 was not just “wind power induced”. If one reads the article, we find that the situation had multiple causes and interruptible customers were restored in 1.5 hours. Only interruptible customers were affected, those industrial customers that pay less if the utility can shut down certain feeders if required.
“In addition, ERCOT said multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday. That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas, created problems moving power to the west from North Texas.”
The timeline from official reports on the incident indicate a 150 MW conventional unit tripped as well, contributing to the reserves shortage. The wind facility’s output reduced to its minimum at a rate of 3.5 hours, rather than trip offline at a moment in time.
Check out the investigations into the incident. It was a learning experience, but certainly nothing catastrophic or indicative of a major reliability problem with a utility grid containing wind power.
http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/pdfs/2008/ela_ercot_event.pdf
Dave Springer and Michael Goggin, great comments backed with actual expertise and insight into the recent incident.
Biomass, wind, solar, enhanced geothermal, hydro, tidal, wave, and algal biodiesel. Large scale electricity storage if necessary via pumped water, underground compressed air or electric vehicles. These are the collection of technologies that will be able to power our world for many generations to come (nuclear too, for the shorter term). It is a responsible thing to do for future generations by developing these technologies now, for many reasons: human health, environment, global warming and peak resources. With proper R&D engineering support, we can have a modern society well into the future likely at low cost and high reliability.
Too many numbers are not adding up to reality.
The Wind Energy groups are presenting (wild) claims, but have no graphs showing their delivery of actual electricity at actual times of day.
Worse, they appear to be claiming credit for theoretical power generated during the actual arrival of the cold front (very high winds for a short amount of time) but not for the long hours of much, much calmer winds but very cold temperatures over the long hours AFTER the cold front moved through west TX (the Lubbock are and high plains), central north TX (Dallas and Fort Worth, then east towards Texarkana, south to about Austin), nor the different winds but still temperatures that crossed San Antonio, then Houston then (a little) of deep south TX.
Until the wind energy groups release their specific hour-by-hour delivery of power for the full three days, I do not believe the press release represents reality. I could be wrong. But making a claim that “Wind power played a major role in keeping the blackouts from becoming more severe. Between 5 and 7 A.M. this morning (the peak of the electricity shortage) wind turbines was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW ..” implies that they themselves do not know how power was provided to what region at what time. Further, the newer (largest) wind turbines today are 1 Megawatt at max power.
Varying just their claimed output between 3500 and 4000 Megawatts means that some 500 wind turbines dropped off line. (Or 1000 wind turbines suddenly and without control dropped 50% of their “claimed” nameplate power.) Gee. What reliability.
Now – There are several other troubling indicators. We see a power demand suddenly and rapidly rise (literally overnight) from a seasonal 25,000 Meg’s to 50,000 Meg’s of power needed. “Nobody” in Texas uses fuel oil for heating homes and workspaces (unlike the northern states where steam heaters, boilers, and home heating oil is more common) – everything is natural gas burners with electric fans to distribute the hot air, or electric-driven heat pumps, or electric resistance heaters.
There were (and still are) limits to how much natural gas can flow through the large pipelines that criss-cross the state. Nat gas shortages (the gas simply can’t flow any faster@ur momisugly!@ur momisugly#$%!!!) will limit both home heating AND power plant delivery to power and gas turbine. (Few steam plants are natural gas driven any more – most were converted to coal between the 70’s and early 90’s.)
The “average” gas turbine plant is about 150 Meg’s to 200 Meg’s. A few new ones are starting construction at 250+ Meg’s – but they aren’t on line yet anywhere. The most common GT is two 150 Meg GT generators plus a third 150 Meg steam turbine-generator being driven by the waste heat recovery boilers from the GT exhaust. So, if I lose the two GT generators because they can’t get natural gas, then the third steam driven unit drops off as well. Result? I lose not one 150 Meg generator, but three.
I don’t accept the answer that only 2 large coal plants dropping out caused the rolling blackout either. We saw from the graph loaded above that power demand rose by 25,000 that night from seasonal averages. If the two coal-powered plants were 2700 Meg each – which might be the case, but seems grossly high; then we still need to account for the rest of the shortage. By the way, the largest nuclear plants are “only” 1100 Megawatts – so the claim that a single coal plant is 2700 Meg’s needs to be scrutinized. (At least as carefully as the wind energy group’s claims need to be verified.) An “average” older coal-powered plant is 250-300 Megawatts. The larger (“newer”) coal-power plants built from the mid-70’s through the late 80’s was 500 – 800 Megawatts.
Did 50 large plants go out at the same time? (50 x 500 Megawatts?) Doesn’t seem right.
Were the output from 50 “new” plants suddenly and unexpectedly needed in 10 hours? Yes.
Was wind power available to provide that power? No.
Was nuclear available? Yes. All nuclear plants in the TX grid were at 100%.
Could 150 large gas turbines make up the missing 50 large coal plants overnight? No.
1. They were not built -> Could not be built in Obama’s regulatory environment, which demands ONLY wind power and does not permit solar.
2. The gas turbines that had been built for summer peak electrical loads were being repaired (Sweeny 2, Magic Valley 3, Magic Valley 2, etc.) or could not get natural gas.
Was the Texas “isolated” national grid to blame? In some ways yes, in some ways no. TX IS an isolated grid system with only AC-DC-AC conversion links at only a few places. (You MUST go back to DC to shift load between grids because of synchronous generation problems. Mess up the synchronous HZ of either grid and you blow up generators with billion dollar electric arcs at 48,000 volts apiece. ) The TX grid is larger than France, or Germany and Eastern Europe, or the UK grid, or the entire Scandinavian-Denamrk-Germany grid. “Hooking it” to the US national grids – Yes, Virginia, there are several US grids – is impossible, impractical, and BAD.
You cannot “ship” electricity further than 900 miles without losing over 70% to heat losses in the power lines. You “can” exchange voltage that far easily, just as you can get water pressure through a 1/2 garden hose 800 feet to a neighbor’s garage. But open the faucet to get water “flow” (current x voltage, or power) through that little garden hose? You get a dribble.
TX is larger than most people realize: getting power across the state, getting natural gas across the state reliably is HARD. But getting the politicians – including the wind power propagandists – to deliver the truth may be much harder.
The questions remain:
Who was generating what amount of power where during those hours of the blackouts?
Who was generating what amount of power at what time?
How many plants had mechanical problems?
What were those problems? Frozen coal? Frozen 1/4 inch instrument lines? No gas pressure? Freezing cooling water lines? (The cooling ponds could not have frozen in that short amount of time.)
The ‘capitol residence’ right now in Texas (where Rick Perry would reside) is being rebuilt; a fire during renovation destroyed what effort and capital had already been spent towards renovation.
As to idle wind turbines, we are finding out that a shortage of natural gas for home heating and gas-turbine electricity generation (as in ‘peaker plant’) probably played a much bigger part in all this …
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@RACookPE1978
Very good synopsis of the situation. Do you happen to know what percentage of the 15 large coal plants Tx planned to build, just a few years ago, to meet critical needs, actually got built? Environmentalists vowed to stop all of them. Judging from the situation, it seems they were pretty successful.
Hmmm … Path 65 also known as “The Pacific DC Intertie” at 846 mi (64 miles shy of 900) seems to be indicated for a ‘line capacity’ of 3,100 megawatts … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
And there are other long lines too on the order of 1200 to 1600 miles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
So, it may all depend on your technique(s) …
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Thanks for the corrections to the timeline, Jim, and the link to Reuters. The Reuters story seems to confirm Mike Smith’s wind data for late on Feb. 2. Fortunately the interruptible customers could “take one for the team” and avoiod a second round of blackouts.
So Texas was lucky to have some wind power early Feb. 2 and unlucky to lose most of it later the same day?
Plus the bad luck of the storm itself, of course.
racookpe1978 , excellent questions and clarity.
I’ve lived in Texas 22 years. The whole time I’ve lived here, the libtards ecowarriors have thwarted any attempts to build generation. They’ve been actively anti-coal and won support from dems and repulicans. Lots of hooey and bad science and not enough real-world thought. So we’ve spent a butt-load of money on feel-good systems and we suffer third-world brownouts when demands exceeds some bean-counters expectation. It’s not like we didn’t know this cold front was coming… they talked about it for a freaking week down here… This was a cluster and deserves a thorough investigation.
And here’s the main problem I have with wind. Everyone wins, the farmer, the electric company, the State, but we, the people lose. They are a blight on the landscape, they have to be heavily subsidized with State and Federal money and we end users not only pay that money in taxes and debt, but we endure the failures of the precious earth-friendly systems . Build modern nuke plants… 50 of them and cheap electricity for everyone and it’s always available.
More shell games. When you roll away the subsidies and add in the backup conventional plant required, the costs are much more than double that. And that’s for nameplate! Triple again for availability shortcomings. Double again for mismatch of peak demand and peak supply. Etc. Then factor in immense transmission costs, servicing difficulty (don’t even think offshore!) and it’s obvious that windfarming is an open artery, bleeding freely onto the sand.
Windfarms are the all-time champeen theft of public goods by one of de Bueno’s “Selectorates” (the minority that has the keys to the vault). Ever. Makes Spain’s theft of Mayan gold look picayune.
And guess what? Living within many, many miles of one is really, really bad for you. Google “windfarm subsonics”. On second thought, use Yahoo Search. Google is getting very creative with its PC filtering and ranking. (And Bing is similarly selective … )
Bill Totten, an only quasi-recovered liberal, has posted this (excerpt):
Wind generation provides a continuously variable output over time, even in the short term – hour by hour, for example. The Texas wind farms were producing between 3600 and 4000 MW during the first hours of the cold snap. No graphs have been presented that show for how long these generators produced some amount of energy over some period of time. We know the limits but not the duty cycle.
This variability means there must be load following gas and coal fired generators on line continuously that follow that variation to fill the void. Think about what that means – generators that could produce more are throttled back when wind power is up but barely, then throttled up when wind power falls off. Wind cannot be made to follow load. Are you thinking about what that means? It means generators are not running at maximum output – they are throttled back to inversely match the fluctuating wind generators. And they are also throttled to adapt to changing loads which again is not something wind power is capable of.
It is important to know too that wind turbine visual activity is no indicator of power generation. A wind mill that is barely ticking over just above the minimum on-line RPM in a variable wind is not a candidate to bring on line.
Gas and coal fired generators cannot be turned off. They can be throttled, but to stop them is a big decision because it requires a good deal of time and effort to restart them. So even if enough wind is blowing that the gas/coal generators are not needed, they still need to run, and if they run without making energy to sell the costs per hour skyrocket.
Feel free to check my work – this is my best understanding of uncontrolled inputs on a grid that requires steady power on demand.
There is an excellent blow-by-blow of the Texas rolling blackouts over at MasterResource.
As for the useless Texas wind power and the causes of the outages here is an excerpt from the article:
Texas Power Outages: A Preliminary Analysis (Cold snap brings failure–isolated ERCOT an issue) — MasterResource
“In brief, extreme cold weather pushed power demand to very high winter levels. At the same time, fifty of the state’s power plants were offline due to the effects of the cold, and several others were undergoing planned maintenance. The combination of very high demand and reduced supply left the ERCOT grid perilously short of reserves. Rolling consumer outages were employed to protect the system from failing completely.
[…]
Some wondered whether wind power was at fault, but wind contributed about seven percent of ERCOT’s power during the emergency – about the same as this time last year.
No power system is immune to hazards. But policy decisions that increase the likelihood of hazards or multiply the resulting damages ought to be given careful reconsideration. In this case, the choice by Texas policymakers to keep ERCOT isolated from surrounding power systems prevented power companies within ERCOT from accessing excess power capacity elsewhere in the state and in neighboring states. Other policy issues also are raised by the emergency, but few are likely to be as cost-effective and technically simple to implement as linking ERCOT to its neighbors.”
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/02/texas-winter-power-outages-ercot/
Jim_in_TX says:
February 3, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Again, this had NOTHING to do with wind power. A coal fired plant failed. Nat gas plants failed because of a shortage of nat gas in the ATMOS system.
Jim, you continue to ignore three messages.
One, wind power is very expensive, not ecological clean, and dues to its extreme intermittent nature, very unreliable. There has been at least three links to very detailed studies on the problems of wind generation even in “ideal” circumstances like Denmark it is a failure, a misallocation of resources. (Did you read them)
Two; if Texas had spent considerably less money on additional conventional power production, and or, looking at the cold coming a week out not closed some plants for maintance, this would not have been a problem.
Third, we do not yet know the entire story as racookpe1978 says: February 3, 2011 at 7:45 pm post details.
You and other posters that continue to harp on the premature and somewhat wrong assumtions about this one instance in the article percepitating this discussion, are missing the BIG picture.